A few notes now that things have settled down a bit.

SOC students and their mentors should have discussed things by now, and be well on their way to working out a plan. My understanding is that Google should soon be sending the initial $500 payments to students. The next established deadline is June 26, when Google will want to get mid-program evaluations of student progress. These need not be very extensive -- a paragraph or two will usually suffice. The main question will be whether the student has done enough to earn the mid-term payment of $2000.

For students, hopefully your mentor has given you a good idea of what you should be doing right now. Probably the first goal for almost everybody should be to make sure that you can build GIMP from CVS HEAD -- that's often not a trivial thing, and it is necessary in order to be able to write usable code. Also, you should familiarize yourself with the GIMP coding rules, as described in

http://developer.gimp.org/HACKING ,

and with the GIMP bug reporting system, as described at

http://developer.gimp.org/bugs.html .

It may be worth your while to look over a few bug reports, to get an idea what they look like and how they are typically handled. At some point, for most of you, your own contributions will give rise to bug reports that you will need to handle.

Right now GIMP CVS contains two active branches, the stable branch that produces 2.2, and the development branch that produces 2.3. In the near future the 2.3 branch will be stabilized into GIMP 2.4, so it is not a good place for speculative development at the moment. Sometime around the middle of June a new branch will be created, which can be used for SOC-related code. The plan is to keep it tightly synchronized with the 2.3 branch, until the next development branch, presumably 2.5, is spun off, at which point it will hopefully be merged with the SOC branch. This is a little bit tricky but we think it will work if we are careful.

In any case, before committing any code to the main CVS branches, you should discuss your plans with your mentor. As a rule, if you are working on files you have created yourself (for example, a new tool), you have pretty much a free hand, so long as you follow the GIMP coding rules and don't break the build. If you are working on files that affect other things, the code should probably be reviewed before you commit it. In any case, you will need to have permissions to make changes in Gnome CVS by mid-June -- we will try to get this for you in the next few days.

For students, even though you have one "official" mentor, we hope that you will treat every GIMP developer as a secondary mentor, and feel free to come to #gimp with any difficulties you run into. All of us are interested in you and what you are doing, and welcome the chance to interact with you -- so don't feel shy about coming to the channel with questions that you think might be naive.

Finally, please let me know about any questions you have or any issues that arise. In particular, if there are any problems in mentor-student interactions (after all, we are only human), I hope you will let me know about them and give me a chance to try to smooth things out.

Good luck!

-- Bill

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